In in this 1969 file photo, actors Robert Redford, left, as the Sundance Kid and Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy appear in this scene from the film ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.'' Spokeswoman for Paul Newman says, Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, that the screen legend has died at age 83 after battling cancer.

There are the facts: He was 83, he was ill, and everyone knew it. And then there are feelings. Newman felt permanent in a way that his contemporaries - Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck - did not. He was in the back of our minds, part of our ongoing world, always doing something and always something good. There was his food line, of course, and his work with sick children, as well as the feat of maintaining a two-career Hollywood marriage for five decades. Newman was an actor, but today, we suddenly realize how much we associate him with sets of ideas, as well, all of them remarkably sane, and having to do with things like citizenship and integrity.

It felt good having him in the world, even if today is the first day we're consciously realizing it.

Beauty of blue eyes

To talk about Newman as an actor, we must start with his blue eyes, though it's impossible to say how much their effect had to do with their beauty and how much with the quality of mind behind them. Indeed, their beauty may have had a lot to do precisely with Newman's mind.

On screen, Newman's eyes had the gift of intense appraisal. He looked at people and saw through them. Sometimes that meant having to bust somebody's head open, though even when he did, he rarely took unwholesome pleasure in it. His remoteness and detachment could make viewers feel ashamed of their own low-down feelings.

For a while, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Newman was our national man. He was what George Clooney is now, only more so: The coolest guy in the world; the man who women wanted and who men wanted to be. His essence as an era's masculine ideal is worth exploring.

Newman came up through the Actors Studio in the 1950s, a training that encouraged actors to look within and locate the wellspring of their pain. But he was different from his famous Actors Studio brethren. Put simply, Newman had no torment in the area of masculinity. Brando was often a kind of clown man, and James Dean and Montgomery Clift wrestled with the demands of manhood. But Newman, lacking any confusion or conflict in that zone, could play men without defense, apology or bluff. His steely gaze could turn outward.

Looking out, his characters usually found a landscape in which they had to hustle, sell, steal or run dangerous scams. The Newman hero acknowledged society as a rigged game, but the world was rigged, not the man. Even when they laughed and carried on, Newman heroes had a loneliness inside them - the loneliness of the survivor, of the man building his own ethics system out of the few things he could trust, independent of polite society.

The above description could just as easily fit Newman's contemporary, Steve McQueen. The key difference between them is that McQueen was inescapably proletarian, and Newman was inescapably patrician. McQueen wore the scars, while Newman's face had the coolness of those upper-class Romans, captured in the first and second century statuary of Rome's Capitoline Museum. As a screen image, Newman harkened to our longing for the mythic at the same time that his film's narratives debunked the idea of the mythic. When he played a hustler, we responded to him as a hero.

The craft of acting

He was born beautiful, but he had to work at becoming a good actor. His appearance could have been a career in itself, but he didn't glide on his looks, but worked for depth and interior structure. He became a matinee idol in the 1950s, but to look at some of those early films today is to see a young actor trying a little too hard. He was miscast as Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956), though no one seemed to mind at the time. His Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is mostly one note of petulance and grievance. In his early years, Newman too often fell back on the angry-young-man reflex.

Newman's apprenticeship ended around 1960. By the time he made "From the Terrace," a film based on a trashy John O'Hara novel, he had the confidence and poise of a major star. "The Hustler," the next year, began his first great period. The angry young man was still there, but there were many other notes as well - observation, canny theatricality, self-deprecating humor, as well as a gallant fatalism. He brought these to bear in some of the decade's best-remembered movies: "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962), "Hud" (1963), "Harper" (1966) and "Cool Hand Luke" (1967).

Middle age suited him

Then, all at once, Newman was middle-aged, and it suited him. The graying hair didn't hurt his looks any, and he seemed more at home with himself and willing to laugh. His second great period began with "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969), which paired him with Robert Redford, and reached its apotheosis with "The Sting" (1973), also with Redford, which won the best-picture Academy Award. The next year, he starred opposite McQueen in "The Towering Inferno" (1974). He was the skyscraper's architect, and McQueen played a fire chief.

By the 1980s, Newman was no longer a top draw, but as a gray eminence he added a number of important films to his resume. He made "Absence of Malice" (1981) for Sydney Pollack and "The Verdict" (1982) for Sidney Lumet. He reprised the title role in "The Hustler" for Martin Scorsese in "The Color of Money" (1986) and finally won his first Academy Award for acting. Thereafter, the roles and movies tended to be less interesting, though a few stand out: He played a general working on the Manhattan Project in "Fat Man and Little Boy" (1989) and starred opposite his wife and frequent co-star Joanne Woodward in "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" (1990) for director James Ivory.

Work as director

Along the way, he directed a half-dozen films, including one for television, the most successful and well-known of which was his first, "Rachel, Rachel" (1968), starring Woodward. His direction was intelligent, not flashy, and very much centered on getting the most from his actors.

Newman spent much of the 1990s playing cantankerous old geezers, but he found one of his greatest roles in his very last big- screen appearance, as a 1930s mob boss in "The Road to Perdition" (2002). It would pay to watch the movie again just to figure out exactly how he did it: The performance was contained, reserved and seemed to show little - and yet, somehow, Newman conveyed the weight of years, of guilt, of an entire life lived in an immoral, irresponsible way.

In a sense, it was the culmination of his art: The flailing, handsome young man of the 1950s had become a master of subtlety, playing a man who was the antithesis of himself. In Newman's hands, the role was like an object lesson on the consequences of making wrong choices, of living for vanity, narcissism and selfishness. It was as if Newman were saying, "This is how easily it can happen," while marveling, with a sense of relief, that despite the temptations of stardom, he had lived a responsible, honorable life.

Mick LaSalle's Newman picks

Here's a sampling - just a sampling - of indispensable Paul Newman movies:

"The Hustler" (1961): the signature role of his youth and the beginning of his great work.

"Cool Hand Luke" (1967): the apotheosis of his screen image.

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969): lots of fun, and what confidence to throw half the movie to a guy who was younger and better looking.

"The Sting" (1973): one of the most purely fun movies of the 1970s.

"The Verdict" (1982): Newman, David Mamet, Sidney Lumet.

"Road to Perdition" (2002): his last big-screen performance and one of his best.

Bonus pick: "From the Terrace" (1960): not great, not even particularly good, but if you want to see what the world's idea of a cool guy looked like in 1960, here's your chance